| The work which we set before the English and American public treats in a single volume the history of Hungary from the time of the arrival of the Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin until the present day.
Individual chapters have been written by leading experts on the various periods, among them professors at Georgetown University, Washington, and at the universities of Budapest and Debrecen, directors of the Hungarian Historical Institutes in Rome and Vienna, as well as the Director General of the historical archíves of the former Communist secret police. Their work is not a summary of others' results; instead the authors have formed their views by their own research, discovering material in archíves which had previously often been barred or inaccessible to Hungarian researchers on political grounds, and finding important source-material in Moscow, Istanbul and Rome. The authors have not evaded the thorny problems of any period; the debated origin of the Székely, the longterm consequences for the nationalities of the Turkish occupation, and the role of the Communist secret police after 1949 are all discussed in these pages. This single-volume history of Hungary does not shy away from addressing even the period between 1990-2004, but offers critical and factual discussion of the period from the falt of Communism up to the present day. The volume contains rarely-published images of Hungarian history from chronicles of the early Middle Ages to photographs of Communist times. The chronological summary and Jucid maps have been devised to assist the better understanding of Hungarian history, as has the select, recommended bibliography and a list of heads of state and prime ministers from the first kings to the present-day leaders of Hungary.
ISTVÁN GYÖRGY TÓTH, Professor of History at the Central European University, Budapest, and Head of Department of Early Modern History at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, is a former visiting professor at Columbia University, New York; Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg; Écoles des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris; and Sorbonne University, Paris. His recept Works include: Literacy and Written Culture in Early Modern Central Europe, Budapest, 2000, Litterae missionariorum de Hungaria et Transylvania, Rome, 2002, Religion et politique en Hongrie au XVlle siécle, Paris, 2004. He is co-editor with Heinz Schilling of the forthcoming Religious differentiation and cultural exchange in Europe, 1400-1700, Cambridge, 2004.
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